1 00:00:00,330 --> 00:00:11,520 Okay. Well, hello, hello and welcome. I think we are expecting a few late comers, but I don't want to stop us getting going right now. 2 00:00:12,060 --> 00:00:18,900 And thank you very much for everyone who has come along on what I know is an exceptionally busy day and time of year. 3 00:00:18,900 --> 00:00:24,390 And thank you especially to people who've come from far afield, from outwith Oxford. 4 00:00:25,230 --> 00:00:30,150 And also my thanks to the Bodleian for hosting us here this afternoon. 5 00:00:31,230 --> 00:00:41,070 I'm Judith Smith from the History Faculty, and I'm co-hosting this forum with Richard Avedon, the head of the Oxford Libraries Network. 6 00:00:41,070 --> 00:00:52,880 Wallace O'Brien. And with me here are Helen Snaith, who, as you can see, is a senior policy analyst with Ukri and David Clarke from UPI. 7 00:00:53,490 --> 00:00:59,459 What we're going to do is each of the four of us is going to make a short presentation which is 8 00:00:59,460 --> 00:01:07,380 being recorded and will subsequently be available as a podcast for colleagues who aren't here. 9 00:01:08,370 --> 00:01:13,650 But then the recording apparatus will be switched off after the presentations, 10 00:01:13,860 --> 00:01:21,989 and there will be an open forum for question and answer and comment from the floor and questions and can 11 00:01:21,990 --> 00:01:27,720 either come to the panel or they can be picked up by other people who are in the audience and so forth. 12 00:01:28,410 --> 00:01:37,080 So without more ado, let me get going and give you a brief indication of what we think we might be talking about and why. 13 00:01:37,080 --> 00:01:43,680 I'm sitting here and I'm sitting here because I'm the director of research for the History Faculty, 14 00:01:44,070 --> 00:01:48,479 which is the largest humanities faculty here in Oxford. 15 00:01:48,480 --> 00:01:53,460 And by faculty in this sense, I mean what most other universities call a department, 16 00:01:54,210 --> 00:01:57,630 in other words, an institutional clustering of disciplinary specialists. 17 00:01:58,470 --> 00:02:07,049 We are probably, although I haven't checked it out, the largest humanities department in the UK. 18 00:02:07,050 --> 00:02:11,970 And if we're not absolutely the largest, then we must certainly be up there in the top couple. 19 00:02:13,930 --> 00:02:19,899 History was one of the four subjects which in the RFP for 2014, 20 00:02:19,900 --> 00:02:28,720 the last research assessment returned more than 50% of its outputs in the form of books and book chapters, 21 00:02:29,440 --> 00:02:35,080 and were a discipline in which the monograph, as we all know and love it, 22 00:02:35,440 --> 00:02:43,509 is indeed the gold standard for scholarship and also for career progression and so on. 23 00:02:43,510 --> 00:02:50,560 Workshop on the future of the monograph is something which is of vital significance to my colleagues in the history faculty. 24 00:02:51,220 --> 00:02:58,930 But I'm not really here just as a historian. I'm sitting here because I think that because of our sheer size and diversity of interests, 25 00:02:58,930 --> 00:03:04,780 which range literally globally and literally from the fourth to the 21st century, 26 00:03:05,080 --> 00:03:14,320 the Oxford History faculty, in some sense does stand for the entire British monograph writing and reading academic community. 27 00:03:15,340 --> 00:03:20,800 So what we want to do today is two things in plan Richard and I in planning this forum. 28 00:03:21,190 --> 00:03:27,969 The first is to begin the process of updating colleagues in history and the social sciences about 29 00:03:27,970 --> 00:03:33,070 some of the significant develops in the developments in the scholarly publishing landscape, 30 00:03:33,280 --> 00:03:38,020 which are of particular concern to those in the history and the social sciences. 31 00:03:38,620 --> 00:03:45,969 But secondly, and equally importantly, to provide an opportunity for everyone here to ask questions, 32 00:03:45,970 --> 00:03:55,900 exchange views and information with people from a wide range of different interests in academic book publishing. 33 00:03:56,710 --> 00:04:02,530 And I should say that we're very lucky that we've got a very wide range of stakeholders present with us today, 34 00:04:02,830 --> 00:04:09,819 people who are involved in all stages in the production and use of monographs as well as in the making, 35 00:04:09,820 --> 00:04:15,940 in the processes of making them available to both current and future generations of readers. 36 00:04:16,690 --> 00:04:24,219 We've got academic colleagues here at all levels, from early career researchers through to very senior colleagues and of course, colleagues. 37 00:04:24,220 --> 00:04:32,860 We both produce and we consume books. We've got publishers present both from the commercial and the academic sectors of the publishing world. 38 00:04:33,130 --> 00:04:41,440 We've got representatives of learned societies. We've got librarians, both subject librarians and system specialists. 39 00:04:41,530 --> 00:04:46,780 We've got research administrators, we've got policy makers and trendsetters. 40 00:04:47,170 --> 00:04:53,320 So this is really a forum with many different positions involved in the future of the monograph. 41 00:04:55,000 --> 00:05:03,580 Now, by brief way of background, all university colleagues, I'm quite sure, are aware that for the upcoming Ref. Ref 2021, 42 00:05:03,760 --> 00:05:09,970 we are required to submit all our journal articles and conference papers in open access format, 43 00:05:10,420 --> 00:05:14,380 and we're not going to be discussing journals here today, 44 00:05:14,770 --> 00:05:20,110 despite the fact that five weeks ago there was a very major European policy announcement 45 00:05:20,740 --> 00:05:26,860 known by shorthand as plans calling for the realisation of full and immediate open access. 46 00:05:27,220 --> 00:05:30,310 It does have massive implications for journal publishing, 47 00:05:30,580 --> 00:05:36,489 but Richard and I don't want to be diverted for reasons which I will come onto in a moment from the goal 48 00:05:36,490 --> 00:05:42,970 which we had when we first developed this plan back in the early summer to keep our focus on books. 49 00:05:44,650 --> 00:05:53,800 Now, the second part of the background is that in December 2016, there was a quiet announcement from Heskey or Heskey, as was, and I'm quoting. 50 00:05:54,040 --> 00:06:02,470 So they intend to move towards an open access requirement for monographs in the exercise that follows the next ref. 51 00:06:02,740 --> 00:06:07,240 And in that context, the next draft was this upcoming 2021 one. 52 00:06:07,390 --> 00:06:15,130 So they're referring to the ref after that, which is predicted to be around 2027, 2028. 53 00:06:16,060 --> 00:06:23,890 So an intention to move towards open access requirement for monographs is what we want to focus on here this afternoon. 54 00:06:24,910 --> 00:06:29,230 And in the words of one of my colleagues who is one of the most high profile, 55 00:06:29,470 --> 00:06:37,600 best selling and best known Oxford academics, we face an existential Brexit like moment. 56 00:06:38,140 --> 00:06:41,470 That's a quote from an email which I received earlier today. 57 00:06:43,060 --> 00:06:53,709 Since 2016, there have been lively discussions among various stakeholders, of which I must hasten to say that I am not party to those discussions. 58 00:06:53,710 --> 00:07:03,430 I'm a complete outsider to them. And there have also been an intensification of the ongoing experiments with open access book publishing. 59 00:07:03,730 --> 00:07:08,680 But as I understand, they remain fairly small scale and open access. 60 00:07:08,680 --> 00:07:13,450 Book publishing, as distinct from journal publishing, is still in. 61 00:07:13,560 --> 00:07:18,730 Pretty much its infancy. So in focusing on open access, 62 00:07:18,730 --> 00:07:27,760 monographs today were focusing on very significantly different issues from those which have faced the journal world over the last few years. 63 00:07:28,600 --> 00:07:32,830 And I'd like to pull out just a few of them as I see it from my perspective. 64 00:07:34,420 --> 00:07:38,380 On the first one, of course, is the length of time that it takes to write a book. 65 00:07:38,980 --> 00:07:46,270 It's not uncommon that it takes 8 to 10 years. In other words, it may very easily cross more than one ref cycle. 66 00:07:47,950 --> 00:07:49,839 Another one is the moment. 67 00:07:49,840 --> 00:08:00,070 The point at which a legally binding publishing contract is signed can often be at the start rather than at the conclusion of that writing process. 68 00:08:01,090 --> 00:08:05,350 And I'm sure that there are colleagues around the university who have contracts, 69 00:08:05,590 --> 00:08:13,510 legal contracts in their drawers which have been there, possibly gathering dust for really quite considerable periods of time. 70 00:08:14,500 --> 00:08:22,510 And I hasten to say that I'm guilty. The economics of Monographic publishing are very different from that of journals. 71 00:08:22,720 --> 00:08:27,610 There are questions about where the burden of financing the production lies, 72 00:08:27,940 --> 00:08:33,310 and there are also questions of authors income generating potential in the form of royalties. 73 00:08:35,590 --> 00:08:42,490 The editorial role of the publishers and the presses is significantly different for books than it is from journals. 74 00:08:43,540 --> 00:08:49,510 There is a big question around copyrighted third party material in the form of images, 75 00:08:49,690 --> 00:08:56,200 text quotations and the like, and the significance which they can play in humanities books. 76 00:08:57,010 --> 00:09:00,430 And then there are big questions around the infrastructure issues, 77 00:09:00,430 --> 00:09:08,020 both the software and the storage solutions which monographic open access publishing suggests. 78 00:09:09,250 --> 00:09:16,659 So my own personal stimulus for agreeing to co-chair this forum with Richard is firstly, 79 00:09:16,660 --> 00:09:21,130 of course, as an individual scholar and author who both reads and writes books. 80 00:09:21,760 --> 00:09:27,190 But secondly, and much more importantly, as director of research for the History Faculty, 81 00:09:27,940 --> 00:09:35,799 I find myself asking the tactical question and it's this What advice should I give colleagues as they 82 00:09:35,800 --> 00:09:42,130 complete their publications for 2021 and lay the groundwork for their submission for the next ref? 83 00:09:42,310 --> 00:09:52,480 What should I be saying to them? And you're all here to help me begin to figure out some answers on equally what sort of book publishing 84 00:09:52,480 --> 00:10:00,010 contracts would they be advised to sign or not to sign as they face forward into the next eight, 85 00:10:00,040 --> 00:10:11,080 ten, 12 years worth of their research? And alongside that, I have another set of issues which I might say are not so much tactical as moral, 86 00:10:11,290 --> 00:10:18,790 and they stem from my very, very great concern for the future well-being of our young colleagues. 87 00:10:19,060 --> 00:10:28,060 And here in Oxford, we've got a very large community of exceptionally talented early career researchers and doctoral students who know that a 88 00:10:28,060 --> 00:10:37,540 monograph with a prestigious press is the gold standard for positioning themselves as advantageously as possible in a job market, 89 00:10:37,690 --> 00:10:41,740 which can be described at best as cutthroat. 90 00:10:42,700 --> 00:10:52,450 What should we be saying to them, and how should we be helping the next generation of scholars form their careers in a 91 00:10:52,450 --> 00:10:57,700 way which is for the health of their disciplines and for the sake of their own career. 92 00:10:58,810 --> 00:11:08,770 So our aim right now is to raise some awareness of these issues and to stimulate a wider flow of questions, comments and information as possible. 93 00:11:09,670 --> 00:11:17,350 And on that note, I'm going to end each of my three colleagues are going to speak for no more than 5 minutes each, 94 00:11:18,100 --> 00:11:25,360 after which we will switch the microphones off and pass over for questions and comments from the floor. 95 00:11:25,630 --> 00:11:32,190 So I'm now going to turn to Helen Snaith, who is at the thick of the policy setting in UK. 96 00:11:32,200 --> 00:11:36,010 Try to give us her take on some of these issues. 97 00:11:36,070 --> 00:11:44,890 Helen, thank you. I think I'm here today. We've speaking with two hats on one as a senior policy adviser at Research England, 98 00:11:45,160 --> 00:11:52,180 and the second as the Secretariat for the Universities UK Open Access Monographs Working Group. 99 00:11:52,630 --> 00:11:59,050 And I'll speak briefly about the work that the UK group is doing and how this work then is 100 00:11:59,050 --> 00:12:05,320 going to inform part of Research England's approach to developing a draft policy next year. 101 00:12:06,160 --> 00:12:15,760 And so we've already stated that in December 2016 the four funding bodies signalled their intention to move towards a requirement for open. 102 00:12:15,990 --> 00:12:22,290 SAS monographs in the RAF, often X expected to take place roughly around 2027. 103 00:12:22,950 --> 00:12:28,560 This was then restated at the Regents conference in February 2018, 104 00:12:28,950 --> 00:12:34,200 and I think that that restatement has actually act as a quite a bit of a catalyst for some of the discussions, 105 00:12:34,200 --> 00:12:37,140 and it's really led to these discussions that we're having today. 106 00:12:38,010 --> 00:12:47,970 There are, of course, huge benefits in extending open access to the monographs to include books, but there are substantial complexities in doing so. 107 00:12:48,570 --> 00:12:55,620 Importantly, and as noted by Jeffrey Cross-sex, report on open access to HeForShe, which reported in 2015, 108 00:12:56,070 --> 00:13:02,100 monographs are vitally important and distinctive vehicle for research communication in many disciplines, 109 00:13:02,100 --> 00:13:07,440 particularly the arts and humanities, and they must be sustained in any move towards open access. 110 00:13:08,580 --> 00:13:12,580 So complementary to the announcement made by the four funding bodies, 111 00:13:12,580 --> 00:13:21,720 then the universities UK Open Access Monograph Group was also was also established in late 2016 and is currently chaired by Professor Roger Kane. 112 00:13:22,590 --> 00:13:29,130 The working group is governed by and is accountable to the University UK Open Access Coordination Group, 113 00:13:29,430 --> 00:13:33,720 chaired by Professor Adam to counter the remit of the Working Group is to monitor, 114 00:13:33,780 --> 00:13:42,720 monitor and evaluate progress towards open access monographs, to foster a dialogue with the sector and to encourage innovative new business models. 115 00:13:44,190 --> 00:13:47,670 The working group has developed three strands of work so far. 116 00:13:48,120 --> 00:13:53,790 The first is a synthesis report that provides an overview of the open access 117 00:13:53,790 --> 00:13:58,620 monograph landscape where the significant activities and developments in this area. 118 00:13:59,020 --> 00:14:02,010 This is the report was published in July 2018. 119 00:14:02,610 --> 00:14:10,140 A further two strands of work focus on data analysis, animal engagement, and fostering a dialogue with the sector. 120 00:14:11,820 --> 00:14:20,160 On the data analysis front, full stop have been tasked with collecting and analysing data on open access monograph publishing, 121 00:14:20,550 --> 00:14:28,980 says the consultancy firm. Full stop. They're expected to report to the university's UK group by the end of the calendar year. 122 00:14:29,700 --> 00:14:33,060 I think it's important to note as well this is not an advisory function. 123 00:14:33,420 --> 00:14:39,480 Rather, they've been tasked with a very specific set of questions put forward by the project steering group. 124 00:14:40,170 --> 00:14:45,300 These questions have been further refined through interviews and surveys with stakeholders. 125 00:14:46,680 --> 00:14:50,370 The Monographs Working Group have also hosted two engagement events. 126 00:14:50,790 --> 00:14:58,860 The first was organised with the Arts and Humanities Alliance and aimed at fostering a dialogue with learned societies and subject associations. 127 00:14:59,640 --> 00:15:06,840 The second was led by the Publishers Association and took place just last week and again aimed at addressing 128 00:15:06,840 --> 00:15:12,150 some of the challenges on open access monographs and some possible solutions to these challenges. 129 00:15:13,510 --> 00:15:22,570 The data analysis from full stop, coupled with the reports from two events, will be published as a package of work in early 2019. 130 00:15:23,050 --> 00:15:28,540 And what we're quite keen to do is to collate the discussions from these two events 131 00:15:28,540 --> 00:15:32,530 and that will be put forward as as this evidence and this body of evidence. 132 00:15:33,340 --> 00:15:40,810 This work then will feed into research England's deliberations on open access monographs during the course of next year. 133 00:15:42,070 --> 00:15:43,930 So in terms of timings, 134 00:15:44,590 --> 00:15:54,430 we expect to come up with a draft policy approach next year and with a view to seeking views and consulting with the wider sector in 2019. 135 00:15:55,150 --> 00:16:04,150 We'd have a view then to reach some firm, direct, firm decisions around the direction of policy and towards the end of next year. 136 00:16:04,630 --> 00:16:09,690 And this would fit in then with the preliminary reporting from the UK, 137 00:16:09,690 --> 00:16:16,210 our open access review, which will also be reporting in the second half of 2019. 138 00:16:17,560 --> 00:16:24,760 And I think it's probably worth stating as well that as we develop this policy there will of course be exceptions. 139 00:16:25,630 --> 00:16:30,820 And we were working with the sector through the Universities UK group, through with researchers, 140 00:16:30,820 --> 00:16:36,250 publishers and other stakeholders in order to identify what these exceptions might be. 141 00:16:37,060 --> 00:16:40,840 I think we want to avoid the trap of if there are being exemptions. 142 00:16:40,840 --> 00:16:48,340 We don't want those to act as disincentives for making a monograph open access, which is such as some of the challenges that we need to work through. 143 00:16:49,690 --> 00:16:59,290 But in the context of today's discussion, it would be useful, I think, to consider some common principles in any move towards open access, 144 00:17:00,800 --> 00:17:08,170 and one would be to maximise the dissemination of scholarship in the arts, humanities and social sciences, 145 00:17:09,310 --> 00:17:14,320 which also want to maintain quality assurance through rigorous peer review. 146 00:17:15,800 --> 00:17:21,500 Which also wants to ensure that the processes of dissemination are financially sustainable. 147 00:17:21,530 --> 00:17:24,890 For universities, publishers and for funders. 148 00:17:25,990 --> 00:17:29,680 I think there are some real opportunities with open access and monographs. 149 00:17:30,220 --> 00:17:37,120 Take for example, unlike journals, there is the ability for the print version to coexist alongside the online version. 150 00:17:37,930 --> 00:17:41,830 We are in a very different model to journals and should be treated as such. 151 00:17:41,890 --> 00:17:45,280 And let's just work this to our advantage. Thank you. 152 00:17:46,650 --> 00:17:50,940 Thank you very much, Helen, but then pass it over to David. 153 00:17:51,600 --> 00:17:56,460 He's the head of the academic division at AUP. Thank you very much. 154 00:17:56,490 --> 00:17:59,520 I thought I'd maybe begin with a personal reflection. 155 00:17:59,850 --> 00:18:08,940 So I began my career publishing monographs in economics, and one of the friends would have seen the last 30 years. 156 00:18:08,940 --> 00:18:19,680 And I'm a generation where the Internet era has been the gradual reduction in the numbers of sales of individual monographs. 157 00:18:19,860 --> 00:18:22,550 Now that comes with two consequences. 158 00:18:22,560 --> 00:18:31,710 One, it challenges the economic viability of the monograph, and it also speaks to the dissemination of the monograph. 159 00:18:31,890 --> 00:18:42,220 And that is particularly relevant because one of the goals here is clearly to disseminate work and have it won't be read and widely consumed. 160 00:18:42,270 --> 00:18:48,330 So we have been through what at various points has been referred to as the crisis of the monograph. 161 00:18:48,780 --> 00:18:52,580 Meanwhile, the monograph continues and university professors do psychotherapy, 162 00:18:53,010 --> 00:18:58,710 spend a great deal of time and effort producing monographs of quality and distinction, 163 00:18:59,100 --> 00:19:04,260 and in turning down and selecting monographs which they don't feel meet that criteria. 164 00:19:04,320 --> 00:19:08,729 Opie is in a unique position because we have a group of delegates who influence and 165 00:19:08,730 --> 00:19:12,600 shape our publishing policy in a way that many of the commercial presses don't. 166 00:19:13,260 --> 00:19:17,400 At the same time, we have seen some commercial presses under pressure. 167 00:19:18,090 --> 00:19:24,240 I suspect largely economically driven, have ended up publishing either many more monographs or not at all, 168 00:19:24,720 --> 00:19:27,720 and the world has shifted quite markedly in that direction. 169 00:19:27,900 --> 00:19:35,730 So we've seen a lot of change. I think what's helpful is to keep in mind the usefulness of the monograph as a form. 170 00:19:36,300 --> 00:19:39,910 It remains obviously relevant in the arts and humanities. 171 00:19:39,930 --> 00:19:49,650 One of the sad things I think many of us have noted is in some fields we've seen a shift from the monograph to sequential journal article publishing, 172 00:19:50,550 --> 00:19:59,940 and there was a risk in any change in the model that the monograph as a concept is undermined by. 173 00:20:01,240 --> 00:20:04,930 Pressurised academics keen to secure that first job, 174 00:20:05,320 --> 00:20:11,139 for whom the attraction of publishing free general schools rather than a monograph sways 175 00:20:11,140 --> 00:20:16,090 them towards the job may only be a good thing or bad thing depending upon the discipline. 176 00:20:16,450 --> 00:20:24,040 But we've certainly seen areas like economics, which has struggled to publish as many of the longer form work which we used to see. 177 00:20:24,040 --> 00:20:29,829 And I also think that's a shame and I'm not really sure that I'm right sometimes 178 00:20:29,830 --> 00:20:35,290 that we see economic models driving publishing behaviour in a way it should. 179 00:20:36,940 --> 00:20:45,040 The challenge has always been about when we talk about the monograph, we must travel a little because the definition of what we mean. 180 00:20:45,820 --> 00:20:50,050 So I thought just to illustrate our points, I would bring along a couple of examples. 181 00:20:52,510 --> 00:21:00,980 So we have an example of a recently published law monograph, which E.P. published, I think two weeks ago. 182 00:21:02,230 --> 00:21:07,060 And this is essentially a Ph.D. which is being extensively developed. 183 00:21:07,750 --> 00:21:16,390 It's gone through a rigorous editorial process. It's part of a series which has distinguished editors, and it meets a certain criteria. 184 00:21:16,660 --> 00:21:20,770 And we know these sorts of books, so in the low hundreds in numbers. 185 00:21:21,220 --> 00:21:24,310 But they were also increasingly widely used electronically. 186 00:21:24,670 --> 00:21:27,250 And that is what a modern monograph looks like. 187 00:21:27,490 --> 00:21:38,049 I thought I would show I would perhaps unfairly contrast this with one of our bestselling and topical U.S. books, 188 00:21:38,050 --> 00:21:45,010 which is a book by Kathleen Jamieson on Cyberwar, which is interesting because this would effectively be a trade book. 189 00:21:45,490 --> 00:21:51,100 She's been very busy on talk shows in the US, but what's interesting is if you look at the content and the format, 190 00:21:51,100 --> 00:21:54,940 what's actually in that monograph, in that book, it looks a lot like a monograph. 191 00:21:55,450 --> 00:22:01,300 And the level of complexity and difficulty certainly is that of a monograph and a level of scholarship and rigour. 192 00:22:01,960 --> 00:22:08,170 And so we find ourselves in this somewhat definitional problem about where we 193 00:22:08,170 --> 00:22:13,150 have a book which may be very well selling and goes in to a worth exercise. 194 00:22:13,300 --> 00:22:20,900 Where does it fit within that? One of the challenges for monograph publishing is to do it well. 195 00:22:20,910 --> 00:22:22,650 It's unlikely to be a profitable activity. 196 00:22:24,420 --> 00:22:31,560 We hope to be profitable, but it's by no means where the larger commercial houses have focussed large amounts of effort. 197 00:22:32,070 --> 00:22:37,650 But there tends to do it because of volume, as I mentioned earlier. So that creates a challenge. 198 00:22:38,610 --> 00:22:43,530 What I think is very encouraging in the broader spectrum of the monograph is that whether 199 00:22:43,530 --> 00:22:49,650 we think about open access or whether we think about more conventional business models, 200 00:22:50,580 --> 00:22:53,730 it is more possible to achieve wide dissemination. 201 00:22:54,510 --> 00:23:01,740 We're still somewhat in our early days, in fact, and I think although we didn't want to get dragged into the journal comparisons, 202 00:23:02,160 --> 00:23:13,470 the interesting thing is that 20 years of journal electronic publishing has created an infrastructure for dissemination and discovery, 203 00:23:13,800 --> 00:23:17,700 and we have not quite seen that to the same level with the monograph or with the book. 204 00:23:18,060 --> 00:23:26,910 But it's a helpful route forwards because it shows us how we can actually ensure that we achieve readership and the dissemination we will want. 205 00:23:27,480 --> 00:23:35,219 And I should say, Domenico, to whatever the future outcome is. I would note that a lot of the conversations around the monograph, 206 00:23:35,220 --> 00:23:40,170 what some would echo the conversations that happened before digital dissemination of journals. 207 00:23:40,470 --> 00:23:45,690 People often believe journals will not be widely read through efforts to try and determine whether they were useful. 208 00:23:46,680 --> 00:23:53,100 Digital simulation has, I think, both created new use and illustrative use and made it more meaningful. 209 00:23:53,100 --> 00:24:03,180 So that can serve as very helpful. What? So I feel a level of optimism about the monograph in whatever form the challenge is. 210 00:24:03,630 --> 00:24:09,600 When we look at the journals space, I mean, it has as an analogy, we don't see too much. 211 00:24:09,900 --> 00:24:14,549 But the challenge is we have created a lot of complexity in the open access area and 212 00:24:14,550 --> 00:24:20,550 it's also created potential the unaffordability of publishing for some authors. 213 00:24:20,910 --> 00:24:26,940 And that remains a real area of anxiety and concern, especially as we move towards the arts and humanities. 214 00:24:27,660 --> 00:24:35,819 It's one thing for particle physicists to pay for open access publishing of whatever format they want to, 215 00:24:35,820 --> 00:24:40,620 because for them, frankly, it's a rounding error on their experimental experimentation costs. 216 00:24:40,860 --> 00:24:52,889 It's a very different thing for historians. I know for gratitude the reference to contract long session draws because I suspect we we probably would 217 00:24:52,890 --> 00:24:57,209 share the concern about how many contracts we have which have been sitting in drawers for some decades. 218 00:24:57,210 --> 00:25:02,430 And we still wait with a mixture of anticipation and fear to see how many of them turn up each year. 219 00:25:03,400 --> 00:25:12,750 At the the point I think we would have to we deeply do publish open access monographs and we've had some success with that. 220 00:25:13,770 --> 00:25:18,180 But still, the take off remains very low. And that is mainly, I think, economic. 221 00:25:18,660 --> 00:25:21,690 The cost is for most people a discouragement. 222 00:25:24,010 --> 00:25:33,220 The biggest challenge I think the sector needs to look at is not one necessarily is affected by o p is constrained and will be published 223 00:25:33,550 --> 00:25:43,750 hopefully by the Board of Delegates who inject quality control and require us to publish at a certain level the challenge we have. 224 00:25:43,990 --> 00:25:50,530 I think if you look at the wider sector is if you move to a model which looks like a low margin, repetitive activity. 225 00:25:51,390 --> 00:25:58,290 Then that activity will become a race to the bottom in terms of quality, in terms of selectivity. 226 00:25:59,190 --> 00:26:06,010 And if the author pays, ultimately, the risk will, and I hope may not be the only way you could articulate this at all. 227 00:26:06,040 --> 00:26:10,410 The pace the risk is what you end up with is a machine learning process, 228 00:26:10,740 --> 00:26:16,680 which is driven by funding being the only way for a publishing company to achieve a margin. 229 00:26:17,280 --> 00:26:23,999 And since much of the monograph publishing is within the commercial sector, not just the university sector, that's a risk and a potential risk, 230 00:26:24,000 --> 00:26:29,970 which I suspect most commercial publishers have no interest in pursuing, but fear they may be driven in that direction. 231 00:26:31,020 --> 00:26:34,950 So I think I'm within my 5 minutes. Thank you very much indeed, Richard. 232 00:26:34,970 --> 00:26:38,010 Finally over to you. So thank you very much. 233 00:26:38,310 --> 00:26:39,260 Ladies and gentlemen, 234 00:26:39,270 --> 00:26:48,870 I'm going to I think some of the things which the early speakers have said live very neatly into some of the things that I'm going to say, 235 00:26:48,900 --> 00:26:58,110 almost as it were, at the kind of tail end of the the lifecycle of such objects as monographs. 236 00:26:58,650 --> 00:27:08,130 But I'm going to start by saying that as a librarian and having been in senior management now for 20 years and witnessed the open access, 237 00:27:10,140 --> 00:27:14,010 dare I call it revolution from that perspective? 238 00:27:14,220 --> 00:27:20,430 In two institutions, Edinburgh and Oxford, librarians have very much been at the forefront of that movement, 239 00:27:20,430 --> 00:27:28,650 and generally in our DNA is widening access to the information. 240 00:27:29,250 --> 00:27:36,610 And I think that's very much been at the forefront of the minds of librarians who've been active in the open access movement. 241 00:27:36,630 --> 00:27:46,560 I count myself as being within that community and have certainly witnessed the benefits that that 242 00:27:46,560 --> 00:27:52,440 has brought to certain aspects of the scholarly communication lifecycle over that period of time. 243 00:27:52,890 --> 00:27:58,380 I'm also somebody who actually now, a very long time ago has published two monographs. 244 00:27:58,740 --> 00:28:05,160 So I have witnessed personally the the role that editors and publishers have 245 00:28:05,160 --> 00:28:11,520 played for myself in improving the communication of my own intellectual output. 246 00:28:12,780 --> 00:28:20,760 And so I am somebody who have really kind of believes in the academic publishing business. 247 00:28:22,770 --> 00:28:28,260 I'd like to give a few little examples from the lie from the boffins perspective. 248 00:28:28,470 --> 00:28:36,720 Having administered the as we administer part of the open access compliance agenda here in the university, 249 00:28:36,720 --> 00:28:43,440 again with our colleagues from research services and I acknowledge my excellent colleague lot of being from research services. 250 00:28:43,440 --> 00:28:49,290 We work very much in partnership on this, but since April 2016, 251 00:28:50,430 --> 00:29:02,880 we have managed on behalf of the academic community in Oxford over 22,000 deposits into our open access institutional repository called ORA. 252 00:29:04,170 --> 00:29:15,570 And we are currently operating at about a thousand compliant articles a month which are being processed by my colleagues in the Bodleian. 253 00:29:15,930 --> 00:29:22,499 And on top of the rest compliant, there's probably about another 3000 a month which are being processed. 254 00:29:22,500 --> 00:29:33,239 So if you like our academic colleagues backlist, so the scale has been enormous and growing alongside that scale has been incredible complexity. 255 00:29:33,240 --> 00:29:36,600 That's one of the things that David said that the policy agenda has brought 256 00:29:36,600 --> 00:29:42,929 into play is extraordinary complexity and a very fast moving policy agenda. 257 00:29:42,930 --> 00:29:46,170 It's been a bit like nailing jelly to a wall, 258 00:29:46,410 --> 00:29:57,900 and we've put up matrices of different policy arrangements from research funders, publishers, journals, institutions. 259 00:29:58,170 --> 00:30:06,600 And actually navigating that landscape has been incredibly complex and difficult and frustrating, and there's been a cost overhead to that. 260 00:30:06,960 --> 00:30:16,680 And I think that has to be added to the economics of any new open access monograph model is the the overhead of compliance. 261 00:30:18,620 --> 00:30:24,110 One aspect of funding open access has of course been the gold route. 262 00:30:24,380 --> 00:30:30,170 Article processing charges. And to give you a scale of that here, an idea of the scale of here in Oxford, 263 00:30:30,500 --> 00:30:40,549 our budget for open app sees this current academic year and this is the Research Council's academic year. 264 00:30:40,550 --> 00:30:54,710 So it's April to April as it were is to sorry is £1.6 million from RC UK and £1.2 million from the Wellcome Trust and the charity's Open Access Fund. 265 00:30:55,100 --> 00:31:03,230 So that's an additional expenditure which is currently being provided to us from the public purse to allow gold open access publishing. 266 00:31:03,500 --> 00:31:17,420 We are currently operating at an average APS APC spend of about £2,000 per article for RC, UK and 2300 for Wellcome Trust funded articles. 267 00:31:17,900 --> 00:31:26,630 So there's an enormous extra cost which is currently being funded by the research councils. 268 00:31:27,530 --> 00:31:33,500 That's currently guaranteed, as it were, until March 2020. 269 00:31:33,950 --> 00:31:41,690 What happens after that and what will happen? Where will the money to fund book processing charges come from? 270 00:31:41,900 --> 00:31:50,150 How can it be fitted into an increasingly tight academic funding system? 271 00:31:53,360 --> 00:32:01,190 Talking of which it might be worth just quoting you a few figures from Oxford's overall research portfolio, 272 00:32:02,030 --> 00:32:03,919 because there is some been some suggestion, 273 00:32:03,920 --> 00:32:10,579 particularly because the research granting opportunities in the humanities and social sciences are so much lower than 274 00:32:10,580 --> 00:32:19,070 they are for the other disciplines that QR could play and should play a role in funding book processing charges. 275 00:32:19,400 --> 00:32:26,360 So Oxford's overall researching come from multiple research sources in the last academic year, 276 00:32:26,360 --> 00:32:31,309 and I confess I forgot to write down whether this is 2016, 17 or 1718. 277 00:32:31,310 --> 00:32:37,400 I think it's 26. 17 was a just a tad over £500 million. 278 00:32:39,300 --> 00:32:45,930 142 million of that came from QR and from the ref driven QR. 279 00:32:46,230 --> 00:32:54,690 That was £80 million and that spread across all the academic disciplines and not in equal proportion, it should be said. 280 00:32:56,160 --> 00:33:03,510 So if that is to be a source of funding, BPC is indeed and possibly even APIs. 281 00:33:04,710 --> 00:33:08,790 There isn't a lot of wiggle room in that budget, if, if any. 282 00:33:12,060 --> 00:33:22,080 So the other thing I'd like to say just about the overhead of compliance is that the libraries and research services, 283 00:33:22,080 --> 00:33:24,540 together with academic administrators, 284 00:33:24,780 --> 00:33:34,890 have taken on a swallowed a lot of these costs themselves have managed their priorities differently from the past to take on this role. 285 00:33:35,130 --> 00:33:42,240 And there has been a huge agenda of advocacy and information provided to the academic 286 00:33:42,240 --> 00:33:49,920 community to engage them with the realities of the rigours of the new policy environment. 287 00:33:49,920 --> 00:33:56,550 And we can expect further more of this to come if it's extended to monographs. 288 00:33:57,750 --> 00:34:07,350 And it has taken quite some time for the articles world to wake up, even in disciplines which are more used to this mode of publishing. 289 00:34:07,700 --> 00:34:17,579 To to take this on board. So I think the time, the lead in times, as Julia was saying, not only about the time it takes to actually write a monograph, 290 00:34:17,580 --> 00:34:24,390 but the time it will take for the academic community to adjust their way of working to fit. 291 00:34:24,660 --> 00:34:28,680 Any new model needs to be generous, I would say. 292 00:34:30,600 --> 00:34:35,790 There were some other kind of more librarian things. I would like to say, if you will forgive me, ladies and gentlemen. 293 00:34:36,930 --> 00:34:46,590 One is about discoverability. One of the benefits of working with the commercial book trade is that they are good at making their books discoverable. 294 00:34:47,520 --> 00:34:55,589 And I think that that needs to be borne in mind that those workflows, those commercial publishing workflows fit very neatly. 295 00:34:55,590 --> 00:35:03,870 We have honed discoverability and library workflows very closely together with publishing workflows over many decades, 296 00:35:03,870 --> 00:35:12,719 and we've got them to work pretty well. One of the things that I've noticed from the leave deposits side of things is 297 00:35:12,720 --> 00:35:19,230 that when we switch to allow electronic publishing through the 2013 legislation, 298 00:35:19,530 --> 00:35:27,900 is that the speed at which those workflows have had to change and continue to evolve is being has been actually quite remarkable. 299 00:35:30,930 --> 00:35:35,610 One of the things I thought I would also mention is preservation. 300 00:35:35,880 --> 00:35:40,500 So one of the roles that libraries play on behalf of the academic community is to preserve 301 00:35:40,500 --> 00:35:44,670 knowledge and to make it accessible for future generations of scholars to access. 302 00:35:45,180 --> 00:35:51,330 We do that in the print world through what we euphemistically termed regimes of benign neglect. 303 00:35:52,320 --> 00:35:59,070 And so they have been really quite neglectful in some institutions over the centuries. 304 00:36:01,020 --> 00:36:04,380 I'm proud to say in this institution, they are much less neglectful, 305 00:36:04,470 --> 00:36:15,060 particularly since we built the Swindon Book Depository, where they are in, I say, standard preservation and environment. 306 00:36:15,300 --> 00:36:22,230 But the discoverability, the preservation of digital content is a growing issue in our community. 307 00:36:22,230 --> 00:36:25,320 And I speak as the president of the Digital Preservation Coalition. 308 00:36:25,650 --> 00:36:33,629 And particularly as electronic publication of monographic form allows so much more richness of content, 309 00:36:33,630 --> 00:36:39,930 particularly audio visual content, to be added to the public publishing environment. 310 00:36:40,290 --> 00:36:45,510 How do we actually preserve that? How do we keep all that together? How do we make insightful in the future? 311 00:36:46,560 --> 00:36:49,890 And the costs of that have to be borne somewhere. 312 00:36:52,080 --> 00:36:59,940 And we're still doing research and development on that. You know, we've we've come a long way, particularly in the last decade or decade and a half. 313 00:36:59,940 --> 00:37:04,019 But there's still a long way to go to figure out how we do that and certainly 314 00:37:04,020 --> 00:37:11,040 how we can ensure the accessibility to that rich content into the future. 315 00:37:13,770 --> 00:37:16,650 There's just one other thing that I thought I would say before I finish, 316 00:37:17,010 --> 00:37:20,940 and that's because I was expecting to hear it said by the earlier participants. 317 00:37:20,940 --> 00:37:30,120 And that's the words academic freedom. So if we're if the model is going to shift to one where the academic community, if you like, 318 00:37:30,120 --> 00:37:36,500 has more control through the allocation of funding as to who gets access to book 319 00:37:36,600 --> 00:37:41,970 processing charges and can then take them to a publisher to seek them to be published. 320 00:37:43,200 --> 00:37:47,790 Who controls that decision making process? How is that to be managed? 321 00:37:50,400 --> 00:37:54,510 And how does that fit within a long standing, 322 00:37:54,510 --> 00:38:09,960 much treasured and highly important culture of academic freedom that we are privileged to enjoy and protect in this country and in this university? 323 00:38:11,530 --> 00:38:15,010 Thank you and thank you to all my fellow panellists. 324 00:38:16,210 --> 00:38:23,170 We have thrown into the air a huge number of issues of very, 325 00:38:23,170 --> 00:38:32,380 very great complexity and in one way or another, all of them are of concern to people here in this room. 326 00:38:32,650 --> 00:38:34,510 Otherwise you would not be here. 327 00:38:35,350 --> 00:38:44,010 We are at the point where could I request our technical help to switch off the sound system, please, so that we not the sound system. 328 00:38:44,080 --> 00:38:47,350 Not as our system. The recording. Yes. So that we ceased to record.